How to Read Old Spanish Handwriting: Procesal, Cortesana and the Formulas of Notarial Records

This is a practical guide to Spanish paleography: how to read old Spanish handwriting from Spain and colonial Spanish America, roughly 1450 to 1800. It covers the cortesana hand, procesal script and its chained form, encadenada, and the italic hands that replaced them, then the spelling, abbreviations and notarial formulae of protocolos, parish books, Inquisition files and colonial records.

Spanish archives are among the richest in Europe, and some of the hardest to read. A sixteenth-century notarial register can look like one unbroken scribble. But the hardest hands were written by a small profession that used set phrases, and a reader who knows those phrases can work out much of a document before reading it letter by letter.

The general method in our guide on how to read old handwriting applies here. This guide covers what is particular to Spanish material.

Which hand are you looking at?

Ask when the document was written, who wrote it and what kind of document it is: a royal letter, a notary's register and a baptism entry from the same year can be in three different hands. BYU's Script Tutorial gives a useful rule of thumb: the cortesana and procesal hands dominated from about 1400 to 1640, and the italic hand replaced them between about 1500 and 1650. A document written after about 1640 is usually in a hand any patient reader can learn.

Cortesana: the court hand

Cortesana, "the courtly hand", was already in use in the fourteenth century and was the hand of the royal secretariat and chancery in the fifteenth. It is small, rounded and compact, with many letters closed by looping strokes that wrap round the word. BYU's tutorial treats it as the Spanish counterpart of the secretary hand. Our paleography guide sets cortesana and procesal side by side.

Procesal: the notaries' hand

Procesal script is the hand most people mean when they talk about "difficult Spanish handwriting". It grew out of cortesana in the late fifteenth century and became general for notarial instruments and court proceedings, which gave it its name: letra procesal, the hand of the proceso. The letter shapes and abbreviations are essentially the same as cortesana's, but procesal is larger, looser and more sprawling, with more linking strokes and irregular breaks between words. By the sixteenth century, letters such as b, c, e, l and s often took nearly the same shape.

The sprawl had a cause. Scribes were accused of writing loosely to finish faster and earn more, and in 1503 a royal order on scribes' fees required council scribes to write 35 lines to a page and 15 words to a line. The rule was extended to the kingdom's escribanos the same year. The scribes went on writing procesal anyway, and it remained the dominant notarial hand through the sixteenth century.

Encadenada: procesal at its fastest

In the seventeenth century procesal turned into procesal encadenada, the "chained" hand, also called letra de cadenilla. It was written very fast, with the pen barely lifted, so letters and often whole words run together in one continuous line. By then procesal was confined to notaries and the escribanos of the royal courts (Audiencias). Encadenada is the hardest Spanish hand, and the one where knowing the document's formula matters most: you will often recognise a phrase by its shape before you can read its letters.

Itálica, bastarda and the colonial hands

The italic hand, itálica or humanística, came from Italy. Writing masters such as Juan de Yciar, whose Arte sutilísima appeared in 1547, shaped it into the Spanish bastarda. In the sixteenth century it was used mainly for letters and private papers, and more in the Crown of Aragon than in Castile. During the seventeenth century it displaced procesal, and from the eighteenth the bastarda española was the standard hand. Its letters are separate and close to modern forms, so start with eighteenth-century itálica and work backwards.

Colonial Spanish America followed the Peninsula. Escribanos in Mexico City, Lima or Bogotá wrote the same hands, so early colonial notarial records are often in procesal and later ones in an italic hand. The pace of change varied locally, so date a colonial hand by the document, not the Peninsular timetable alone.

Spelling and letterforms that trip readers

Old Spanish spelling was not fixed, and much of the difficulty is spelling rather than handwriting. BYU's notes on interchangeable letters list the ones to expect:

• i and y swap freely: yglesia for iglesia, Ysabel for Isabel
• b, v and u swap: nuebe for nueve, nobiembre for noviembre, scriuano for escribano
• x, j and g swap: Ximenez for Jiménez, lexitima for legítima, muger for mujer
• c, z, s, ss, ç and x all appear for sounds now spelled c, z or s, as in Lorenço for Lorenzo
• h is added or dropped at will (henero, oy), or stands where modern Spanish has f or g (Fernández and Hernández)

Then the letterforms. BYU lists c and e, r and v, and u, v and n among the common look-alikes. The long s (ſ) is easily read as f, and a double s is often written with two different forms, one like an undotted j. Scribes ran words together and split them, with no hyphen at a line end. Capitals appear mid-word, accents are mostly absent, and punctuation is sparse.

Keep all of it in your transcription. Ximenez and Jiménez may be one family, but the scribe's spelling is evidence, and a modernised name can mislead a search. Our article on historical language normalization explains why the original form should stay the record and any modern spelling sit beside it.

Abbreviations and numbers

Spanish scribes abbreviated constantly, and the older the document, the more they did. BYU sorts them into six kinds of abbreviation, and recognising the kind is half the work:

• Contractions keep the first and last letters, usually under a line or tilde: dho for dicho, nra for nuestra, Hernz for Hernández
• Superpositions raise the last letters: Franᶜᵒ for Francisco, Catª for Catalina
• Suspensions keep the start of the word: vec. for vecino, leg. for legítimo, porq for porque
• Initials stand for whole words or phrases: Ldo. for licenciado, S.M.E. for Sancta Mater Ecclesia (Holy Mother Church)
• Conventional signs replace syllables. Xpo stands for Cristo, so Xptobal is Cristóbal, and 7bre, 8bre, 9bre and Xbre are septiembre to diciembre.
• Interwoven abbreviations, with letters written through one another, are found almost exclusively in procesal

Others you will meet constantly are q̃ for que, dha for dicha, vmd for vuestra merced, and in money mrs for maravedís and ps for pesos. Our guide to manuscript abbreviations explains the marks of suspension and contraction that Spanish scribes shared with the rest of Europe.

Numbers need their own care. Roman numerals are often written in lower case (iii), and older documents use a U-shaped sign to separate thousands from hundreds, so "1 U DXCI" is 1591. Notarial dates are usually written out in words: a dos de mayo de mil setecientos tres, the second of May 1703. In arabic numerals, 1 and 7, and 5 and 9, are easily confused.

Notarial formulae: read the frame first

By the sixteenth century the language of Spanish notarial documents was so standard that formularies were printed for notaries to copy. BYU lists six elements that every notarial act should contain: the parties appearing before the notary, the date and place, the identification of the parties, the legal language for that kind of act, the witnesses, and the notary's authentication.

Each comes with set phrases. Learn them, and you can locate the parts of any act before you read it closely:

• Sepan cuantos esta carta vieren: "Know all who see this document", the classic opening of a deed or power of attorney
• En el nombre de Dios, amén: the invocation that opens a will
• parecieron presentes ante mí el infrascrito escribano: "appeared before me, the undersigned notary", followed by the names
• otorgo y conozco: "I grant and acknowledge", introducing what the party is doing
• vecino de: "resident of", the most common identifier after the name
• estando enfermo del cuerpo y sano de la voluntad: "being sick in body and sound in mind", in wills
• de esto doy fe and en testimonio de verdad: the notary's authentication, just before his sign and signature

The date usually comes near the end, with the witnesses. Once the frame is marked, what is left to read slowly is the part unique to this act: the land, the dowry, the debt or the bequest.

The documents you will meet

• Protocolos notariales. An escribano kept his acts in a register, and at the end of each year he bound each year's documents into a volume in date order, often with an índice at the front. Sales, dowries, powers of attorney, inventories and wills are all here, though not every act had to be registered. Our guide to notarial records for genealogy covers how family historians use them, and our guide to transcribing old wills applies to testamentos too.
• Parish books. Priests were required to keep registers of baptisms, marriages and burials after the Council of Trent (1545–1563); civil registration began only in the nineteenth century. Entries follow a fixed formula (bauticé solemnemente, hija legítima de, abuelos paternos), and many priests wrote a plainer hand than the notaries, so they are the best place to learn. See our guide to transcribing parish records for the conventions.
• Inquisition records. The Spanish Inquisition ran from 1478 to 1834, in Spain and through tribunals in the Americas. Its files are trial records (denunciations, testimony, interrogations, sentences) written by the tribunal's notaries. Read them with the method in reading old court records.
• Colonial records. The central records of colonial government, from petitions and probanzas de méritos to passenger licences and lawsuits, are largely in the Archive of the Indies in Seville, created by Charles III and opened in 1785. Notarial, parish and municipal records stayed in the Americas. Spain's state archives, the Archive of the Indies among them, publish catalogue records and many digitised images through PARES, the Spanish archives portal.

Latin turns up in church records, and Catalan in records from Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearics. For a neighbouring tradition, see our guide on how to read old French handwriting, and for the wider European picture, early modern paleography.

How to read a 16th-century Spanish document, step by step

1. Identify the document. Its type, date and place tell you which hand and formula to expect.
2. Find the frame. Mark the opening formula, the names after parecieron, the date and the notary's closing. These are the parts you can read by shape.
3. Start with what you already know. Names, places and set phrases give you letter forms you are sure of.
4. Build the scribe's alphabet. Copy each letter as this scribe makes it, especially the look-alikes (b, c, e, l, s), and check doubtful words against your list.
5. Read aloud and ignore the spacing. Procesal joins and splits words at random, and sounding out a run of letters, with b/v and x/j in mind, often produces the word.
6. Mark abbreviations as you go. Underline anything with a line, a raised letter or an odd sign, and expand it once you are sure.
7. Check numbers against context. A date must fit the entries before and after it, and a sum must fit the act.
8. Read other acts by the same escribano. A word that defeats you on one page may be clear on the next.

How to write the transcription

Write a faithful transcription first and a modern reading second, if you need one:

• Keep the scribe's spelling, capitals and word division, or mark where you have changed word division
• Expand abbreviations visibly, for example d[ic]ho or Fran[cis]co, so a reader can see what you supplied
• Keep line breaks, or mark them with a vertical bar ( | ), so the transcription can be checked against the image
• Mark uncertainty and damage. Use [?] after a doubtful reading and [ilegible] or [illegible] for what you cannot read.
• Record the reference: archive, protocolo or book, folio, recto or verso

Signs vary between editors, and the Leo Academy Handbook shows how transcription signs differ between editions. State your key at the top and keep to it.

Where Leo fits

A single baptism entry is a pleasant puzzle. A protocolo of several hundred folios is a project, and a first machine transcription gets you to the reading much faster. Leo is built for that work, on historical documents in the Latin alphabet, Spanish among them.

Its transcription model, ATR-1, is specially tuned for historical documents. It is trained to transcribe what is on the page rather than tidy it, so the scribe's spellings are kept, not quietly modernised the way general-purpose AI models tend to do. In a Spanish record, Ximenez, muger and lexitima are evidence. ATR-1 reads the image at high resolution, where general models downsample it, and needs no training on your scribe's hand. Built-in failure detection hides output that looks wrong, retries it, and refunds the credit if it cannot succeed. The errors that do get through are the recoverable kind: a wrong character or word that you check against the image shown beside the text.

The workflow fits an archive project:

• Upload photographs from your phone, scans or PDFs. An opened register photographed as a double-page spread counts as one image.
• Organise documents into folders by archive, escribano or book, with dates and references in each document's metadata
• Search every transcription at once, with fuzzy search to catch Ximenez and Jiménez in one pass
• Keep layers separate. The Modernize Transformation writes a modern-spelling version into its own tab, and Translate writes an English translation into another. The faithful transcription is never overwritten.
• Compare readings. For a stubborn passage, Leo's model library lets you run one of the major general models over the same image into its own tab. ATR-1 stays the default.
• Share and export. Send a colleague or relative a read-only link (no account needed), or export to Word, PDF, HTML or TEI.

Whatever produces the first draft, check it against the image, and give names, dates, sums and places the closest look. Our method for verifying transcription accuracy shows how. Every correction you make in Leo feeds back into training, so later readings improve.

Leo has a free plan, so you can start with a few images from your own documents and see how far a first transcription takes you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is procesal script?

Procesal is the Spanish notarial and legal hand of the late fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. It grew out of the courtly cortesana hand and kept its letter shapes and abbreviations, but it is larger, looser and full of linking strokes, with irregular breaks between words. It takes its name from the proceso, the court file, and it was used for notarial registers and lawsuits in Spain and Spanish America. Its seventeenth-century chained form is called procesal encadenada.

How do you read 16th-century Spanish handwriting?

Start by identifying the document and its formula, then mark the parts you can read by shape: the opening phrase, the names, the date and the notary's closing. Build an alphabet of the scribe's letters from words you are sure of, and read aloud, because procesal joins and splits words at random. Expect b and v, x and j, and i and y to swap. Practise on parish entries before notarial acts.

What does "dho" mean in old Spanish documents?

Dho is a contraction of dicho, "the said", as in el dho Juan, "the said Juan". The feminine is dha (dicha). It is one of the most frequent abbreviations in Spanish records, along with Franco or Franᶜᵒ for Francisco, vec. for vecino, Xbre for diciembre and Xpo for Cristo. A line or a raised letter over a word usually means letters have been left out.

Can AI transcribe old Spanish handwriting?

Yes, as a first draft you then check. General-purpose AI models tend to quietly modernise spelling, which loses evidence. Leo reads historical documents in the Latin alphabet, Spanish among them, with its model ATR-1, which is specially tuned for historical documents and trained to transcribe what is on the page. It reads the image at high resolution and needs no training on your scribe's hand. Check every transcription against the image beside it, especially names, dates and sums.